


Sweet Pea and Lillies, Stained Through and Through

by necrocretin



Category: Sons of Anarchy
Genre: Blood, Clay's POV, Death, F/M, Gen, Guns, LAY DOWN|TRY NOT TO CRY|CRY A LOT, Last Moments, Prison, Regrets, Violence, a lot of blood ngl, everyone but clay and gemma are only mentioned in passing, fuel for tears, gut-wrenching sadness and heartbreak ahoy!!!, i don't remember why i tortured my poor weak heart by writing this, i'm probably forgetting a bunch of things that should be tagged but oh well
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-02
Updated: 2019-04-02
Packaged: 2020-01-01 00:07:08
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,272
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18324710
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/necrocretin/pseuds/necrocretin
Summary: Clay’s last moments and the brief prison stay leading up to the end. [originally posted on tumblr without a title in 2014 (I think? there's no timestamp on the original post whoops), on my ancient SoA rp blog lmao]





	Sweet Pea and Lillies, Stained Through and Through

**Author's Note:**

> Buckle up and grab some tissues yall.

Clay could still taste blood when they strapped him down in the psych wing of the infirmary. On the back of his tongue, in between his teeth, in the little cracks in his chapped lips. He swallowed again and again until the taste of wet cartilage faded, until he could focus on the bitter copper; it was like the oily gristle on a steak. Tough and too heavy on the palate. Desperate times had called for desperate measures and he quickly came to the decision that, no, cannibalism wasn’t for him. Tig and his snapping jaws could enjoy the compulsion alone.

 

The ward doctor slipped a throw-away phone into his hand and gave him a time limit. Forty minutes. His series of calls didn’t last nearly as long. He was left laying there, fumbling the cold plastic and thinking over the words he had spit into the receiver, the plans he had woven into.

 

The rotation… rotated. The doctor returned and reclaimed the phone, and Clay thanked him. He watched his white coat flutter to and out the door– and he watched two guards take his place. The one he had assaulted, wearing a bandage across his face like a streak of war paint gained from a blind battle, and a friend.  
Forty minutes.

 

Expectation had braced him but couldn’t lessen the retaliation. They left him dipping and weaving out of consciousness. Forty minutes felt like forty years.

 

At his age, he felt like he could rightly make that sort of comparison.  
The straitjacket they stuffed him into was too tight. The straps, wound around him, forcing him to hug himself in an embrace that felt like salt in his wounds, irritated his bruised ribs. Were they cracked? Didn’t matter. Swelling made his face throb along with his hammering heart. He felt hot and heavy and sluggish, despite the lasting high from the adrenaline rush that comes with getting the ever-loving shit beaten out of you.  
The blood he tasted was his own. He couldn’t even remember that greasy-sweet cartilage. The pain stole his focus and, in the echoing silence, he was glad for it. It seemed the sort of thing to occupy his mind when he couldn’t hear the shouts of fellow inmates or the grumbling of tired guards or even the steady drip-drip-drip of that chrome sink in the corner.

 

His new room didn’t have a sink. Or a toilet. Or…. anything. Just white. White walls, white floor, white ceiling, with his white jacket and his white shoes and that white-hot pain blossoming from his sunken, bruised face.

 

White silence.

 

Breathing seemed too loud.

 

With time, he grew used to the pain– or, as close as he would come. The body never accepts pain, it’s just the mind that tricks us into thinking it can. And his mind had other woes to vent beyond his busted face and battered body. A migraine bubbled at the base of his skull, slowly creeping up and around, and settled a burn in his sinuses, making his eyes water.

 

He thought of Gemma. He thought of the way she crumpled beneath him and how sick he had felt with her blood on his knuckles. He thought about the months that passed, how she had grown from weary, due to the attack he was certain he could have prevented, to outright hating him. He lost her to Nero; the pimp, her suave Caballero de Brillante Armadura.

 

The last time he held her– no, not the very last, not the time the guards forced him upon her– the last time in their home; he held her and kissed her hair and her solid weight was so comforting against him. She was warm and soft and pliant beneath his rough hands.

 

He could still smell her shampoo. Sweet pea and lilies. Ironic, because she was neither chaste nor pure.

 

When he did inhale, it shattered. He could only smell sharp antiseptic, the bleach they scrubbed the cell down with, and the drying blood on his upper lip. That breath hurt so much more than the last. A cold clenching settled in his chest, like a clammy hand around his ashen heart.  
Jax had wanted him out long before he laid hands on the Queen.The Brat Prince used it as another catalyst– Clay didn’t have it in him to be bitter about it. It was his fault.

 

All of it.

 

For a moment, he couldn’t even scorn Jax for all the undermining and backhanded draws. He couldn’t blame him for wanting to satisfy his dead daddy. He played right into it all. All of his hard work, everything he did and gave for the club, even past his blatant greed, had gone to waste before it had a real chance to flourish.

 

“I just want him to love me.”

 

Had he said that out loud? A ghost of himself, from all those many months ago, spoke right into his ear. Sounding defeated and tired, that voice– his voice– was too loud in the white silence.

 

He smiled– no, grimaced. For so long, Jax had been fine with the guns. They butted heads, of course, just the same as any other father and son. Jax had been almost compliant– right up until he found that memoir, then it all became a pissing match. If Clay had to guess, he’d imagine that even then, well after that patch had been torn from his chest and he’d been kicked from the table and locked up, put out of sight, Jax was still doing things to spite him.

 

The Club– his Club – was in the hands of an angry child.

 

Jax was reckless and headstrong and, more often than not, entirely self-serving. ‘Doing it for the Club’ usually meant 'doing it how I think is best for the Club, despite what literally everyone around me is warning against’. Once he got it in his head to do something, he did it. With more gusto, especially, if it was going to piss someone off.

 

So it seemed to Clay.

 

And that was too dangerous. He hadn’t heard word, but he had to wonder, fear, if anyone else had died since they tossed him away. And what if they did? He wouldn’t catch wind of it. He wouldn’t get a chance to say goodbye or 'I love ya, brother’. He wouldn’t get to stand at any podiums to give any eulogies and he certainly wouldn’t be a part of any funeral progressions.

 

If circumstance were different, if he were able to get out and stay stateside, he doubted they’d even tell him firsthand where the damn graves were.

 

Had Otto worried about that? Missed chances and belated goodbyes and whatever bad news the next visiting hour would bring. That was one brother that had been little else than righteous and devoted. Right up until the very end. And Clay? He barely even had the chance anymore. Whatever selfless acts he could conjure were too little, too late.

 

He wondered if Otto ever sat in that same cell. Over the course of his multitude of aggravated assaults and poor behavior, Clay didn’t doubt he’d at least seen the inside of some white cell. What did he think of in the white silence?

 

Luann, Clay guessed. Just the same as he wept for Gemma and longed to see her, feel her, smell her.

 

Otto was lucky only in the regard that he never fucked up bad enough to make his Old Lady hate him.

 

His eyes stung and he realized he’d been crying.  
———-  
How long had he been in? Long enough to get tired, long enough for his eyelids to drift shut despite how the white silence and his loud thoughts kept him painfully conscious. Just when the exhaustion got to him, injuries and anxieties taking their toll, the electric locks in the door buzzed and the heavy, padded steel hauled it’s way open. Bloodshot baby blues stuttered open in time to glance the two guards over before he was hauled up to his feet.

 

Moved back to Gen. Pop., adjacent to his moved trial date. If the recourse of surging noises didn’t empty his head well enough of those sorry, white thoughts, then the rushing of his plans with the Irish, certainly did the job.  
——————–  
Even before he’s chained up like Michael Myers, the doubt started to bubble in the back of his head. The metal bench in the armoured truck was hard and cold beneath him, but he didn’t feel it, not really. His face still throbbed with those fresh bruises and his ribs ached with each inhale, each exhale. Hung between his knees, connected with a thick cuff chain, his hands trembled when he curled his fingers into idle fists and he found himself wanting, not for the first time in a long time, Gemma to give him a shot of cortisone.

 

She was the only one that could ever do it right.

 

He heard the screeching tires and the impact of, presumably, another vehicle taking out the first car in the line up, before the truck bounced to a stop and the transport officers buzzed with panic.

 

“Shit!”

 

“This zero-four-zero, we are under attack! All units call! We need everybody at our twenty- now!”

 

Past the shouting, he couldn’t make out the muffled voice of his rescuers. Who the hell are they?

 

“Angels,” Clay stated smugly, but without gusto. “Sent by the God of Justice.”

 

Shots fired, the windshield shattering, more voices, more shouting. The cacophony filled him with a welling anticipation– no, dread. The doors hauled open and the very last person he expect to see was the Brat Prince himself.

 

The knot in his stomach wound tighter.

 

“Where the hell are the Irish?” Not here. Foreboding.

 

“In Ireland.”

 

In better spirits, he still wouldn’t have been able to appreciate the cut-and-dry sarcasm.  
——————————  
They changed Clay out of his prison clothes and into something more familiar, and took him to the hanger, where Galen was waiting to take him to the airport. They met in the office and Clay beamed and hugged his new partner– and watched Jax put a bullet in his skull.

 

He knew even when he had that dumb grin on his face. He knew before that, some part of him, somewhere, did. Nothing, however, could have prepared him for the stark reality, that hit him like a bucket of ice water dumped over his head.

 

He wasn’t going to Belfast. There was another plan and he already knew, already had greasy tendrils of realization, true and full realization, wrapping around him. Squeezing, choking.  
—————————————-  
Juice’s stony features and cold silence hurt him more than any spoken words ever could, yet what came next outweighed that pain by a hundred fold.

 

The way Gemma looked to Nero before approaching him, tore open the scab of losing her and made him feel that pain all over again, fresh. But at the same time, it gave him solidarity. If he had any bitterness left in his shrunken heart, he perhaps would have wondered how long Husband Number Three would last. As he gazed at her, he only felt, through the pain, a surge of relief that she would have someone.

 

Not someone to take care of her, no. Gemma never needed to be taken care of. She was always paragon of strength, he thought.

 

He couldn’t smell her through his swollen sinuses, through his broken nose, but he imagined she still smells like sweet pea and lilies. He hoped so. “I’m glad you’re not alone, Gem.”  
—————————————–   
Unanimous. They all agreed to it– all of them. A year ago, he would have been bitter and angry. He would have screamed and put up a terrible fight, gone out in a blaze of glory… But he knew they were right to do it. Months prior, when he said that Jax should have killed him when he was lying in that hospital bed, he meant it. Maybe the new direction isn’t so bad. Maybe it’s right, if it’s what all the brothers want, if it’s what makes them happy. Clay found an odd chunk of solace in the fact that, though his own plans were played off of and fallen through, he could at least help with that final push out of guns towards the clean future Jax wanted so badly.

 

“Come on, let’s go.” After almost three decades of friendship, of toiling hardship together and of loyalty, that’s all Tig could offer him. A sparse glance and four words. It hurt. it hurt just as badly as the silence Juice offered him, almost as bad as losing Gemma. Even so, wounded and growing numb from over-stimulation, Clay found death all too easy to accept.

 

“This good?” His voice came out soft and hoarse. Cracked. Defeated. Jax raised the gun and Clay’s eyes trailed over the lot of them, searching each face for… something, anything. Then he caught Gemma through window, past the parted blinds, watching him with wide, bemused eyes, and a small, bittersweet smile crept onto his face. Death was easier to swallow looking at her, remembering sweet pea and lilies and tender kisses and sunday mornings spent in bed and the careful way she held his hands whenever she plunged that relieving needle into him.

 

He heard the flashbang. Felt searing pain tear into his throat and his body went cold with chills before he could feel the hot splash of blood that spewed past the ragged wound. And he heard her cry too loudly through the thin walls and, stupidly, he wanted to apologize.

 

Clay could still taste blood.

**Author's Note:**

> I'd apologize but I'm not sorry lmao. If I had to break my own heart by writing this, then anyone fool enough to read it has to suffer the same fate. ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯


End file.
